I stared at the screen stunned, a foreign and distant fear clouding my thoughts even as terrible anger boiled up to silence it at how casually this thing talked about changing me, reaching into me and violating me down to the blueprints of my existence.

  “Am I even human anymore?” I asked softly staring at the line calling me a hybrid entity.

  My trembling hands raised and I turned them over observing the scarred flesh, the deathly pale skin with vibrant blue veins coursing underneath.

  “You still look human… shame.” One of the voices interjected, before another brought my attention to the dust surrounding me, and sure enough they were right, dust coated my arm and window. More than the black dust that covered the floor where I’d stood moments before; a grey pall was settled over my entire home, thin but present.

  Cold glass leeched the heat from my hands, hand prints smudging my window as I cleared the dust and looked outside.

  The streets were silent in the dawn light, cars sat lining the sides of the road with a couple stopped dead in the street, further along near an intersection twelve twisted hulks of metal sat, a dozen cars crushed and bent out of shape, a jack-knifed lorry sat crushing a set of cars, dried blood crawled up one of the bottom edges, a ripped off car roof sitting half under the trailer.

  Ignoring the intrusive screen, I stumbled through the dark to my bed, palms slapping against fabric and wood until finally my hand slammed down on a piece of glass, and I picked up the phone, my fingers digging into the buttons holding and pressing each one before I squeezed every button at once.

  My fingers clasped around the obstinate piece of steel and glass that refused to give me any sign of life, then the screen cracked several chunks blowing across my arm as the frame bent in my hand.

  “We need to find Alice.” I said and heard simultaneously; the thought echoing through my mind in unanimous agreement.

  My hand flew up and I punched through the new screen that opened right before me before reading through it.

  “What archetype?” I asked experimentally before it seized the invitation the original screen sliding up front and center before shifting to display a new panel of details.

  “Wow...” I stared at the screen at a loss for words. Then I found them almost immediately after.

  “What an unbelievably unhelpful load of horseshit. How about you get preternaturally in tune with my dick in your mouth.” I scoffed at the vague, trite, and overly broad descriptions, casting aside the descriptions and considering instead what I wanted and thought suited me.

  “Ranger… it has a pull to it. I do love the outdoors, camping, wilderness survival.”

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “But you’re a greedy arrogant animal.”

  “Dude what the fuck?”

  “Now give me a second, alright? I’m not just being an asshole. It’s true. We’re greedy, arrogant. None of us ever think enough is enough. Be real, we don’t settle into a role. Maybe you’ll be content for a time, but you’re gonna want to be the dominant life form in any ecosystem you end up in.”

  “Yeah I can… see that.” I replied absently, following his train of thought. Eventually there would be something. The only question was how long until there was a resource I would rather consume than conserve, something I didn’t feel worthy of coexisting with me.

  I scanned over the warrior option again. It was the most obvious choice. After all I had spent my entire life fighting and making others bleed for my mistakes. When fighters came, hits and gangs moved in, it was me they broke their backs on.

  “But that’s not who we are anymore either. It hurts to breathe. I wanna scream every time I take a step. You get tired just walking across town.”

  I closed my eyes. Visions of broken terrified people, phantom sensations of warm wet blood rejuvenating my skin and filling me with the strength and hunger to go again. Then the memory was replaced, the only sensation filling me the ice cold apathy I felt looking at my X rays and scans.

  I took in the memory like I had every time I remembered that sight, seething with impotent rage. The images had shown a broken person, every joint empty, brain scans that showed significant damage to the nervous system. Someone held together by rage and will more than science.

  A series of ‘lucky’ genetic mutations keeping me barely functional where others would be wheelchair bound helpless.

  I sighed, letting go of the option and stared at the occultist archetype.

  It drew me in, something deep inside me calling out for it. It was childish I knew. I wanted validation for the years I had spent as a practicing pagan. I wanted magic. I had my entire life. Every moment I felt like I was missing something, something integral to who I was. A phantom limb that I never had but knew bone deep was going crazy trying to flex, and this ‘archetype’ felt like that, and I wanted it.

  “I’ll take the occultist archetype.”

  “Very helpful maybe you want to explain what this shit actually means?” I asked with a growing confidence for how the system worked as I directed my thoughts at the stats and their negatives.

  Huh… it’s actually quantified exactly how much my disability is reducing me. I thought staring at the numbers that suggest I was half the man I once was if that.

  “Thank fuck you didn’t pick Warrior, god damn that would have been a disaster, literally all our physical stats are halved.”

  “Not literally.” I said mostly just to annoy the voice as I mentally queried the mutations tab.

  “I wonder whether that’s good or bad?” I asked myself more than the system yet I was pleasantly surprised with how informative and responsive it, a stark contrast to its fictional counter parts.

  “Oh…. Well that’s a bit depressing so compared to the rest of the species even massively crippled I’m average and above, but if the species was living up to its potential id only be average even at my best.”

  Fuck these inferior animals, being out-done by a literal invalid… Disgusting.

  “Alright so what’s the point in telling me any of this shit?” I asked casting my hands out to the screen, where upon it immediately added lines to answer me.

  Glancing back out the window, I took in the destruction: the dead cars, blown out windows in buildings, the heavy overcast of grey and fog that had nothing to do with the weather and was instead the product of dust and debris from the cracked open city. I looked across my own bedroom at the fractures in the walls and the dust coating a shattered beam over my bed.

  “Okay… so why the fuck does it look like you nuked us?”

  “Helpful.” I scoffed at the screen. Then I licked my lip for a moment, a thought coming to me.

  “Can you help me find Alice?”

  The system didn’t answer me the way it had before. Instead, the extended status screen closed out, a quest notification overtaking it.

  That’s not helpful. I almost snapped it out before I re read the quest.

  “Three days?”

  What the hell happened to keep us asleep for so long? The beam smacking me in the side flashed through my mind before the deluge of voices pounced, denouncing the idea that such a minor blow would have knocked me out.

  I snapped out a command to the screen, fury flooding my senses at all the time I’d lost, at all the time I was still losing playing twenty questions with hallucinogenic customer support.

  “Explain these mutations to me, and what the hell you did to us!”